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Friday, July 15, 2016

The double-episode return of USA's heavily-acclaimed Mr. Robot averaged a 0.43 demo, narrowly dodging the 0.42 season low from last year and not far behind the 0.46 season premiere and finale.

There are a couple ways of looking at this. The natural reaction is probably: "Boy, all that hype did nothing for the ratings!" The way I look at it is two-fold: first, being down 7% year-to-year is a really good trend on cable nowadays. But I'm also kinda cautious because there's a lingering possibility that the hype did do something for the ratings, and this 0.43 is actually inflated compared with what's to come. If it holds up as well post-premiere as it did last year, I think USA's gonna be pretty happy. But let's wait a week and see if that happens.

Leading into Robot was the less-ballyhooed but more-watched return of Suits (0.53) at 9/8c, down by an also healthy-for-cable 13% year-to-year. Another point in defense of Robot is that it brings a considerably different audience to the network: Suits had a very close to 50/50 gender split (0.55 W18-49 / 0.52 M18-49) while Robot nearly matched Suits in M18-49 (0.51) but had less than two-thirds retention in W18-49 (0.36).

Another critical favorite came on the scene three days earlier in the miniseries The Night Of, another soft HBO drama launch at 0.27. That's a teeny bit better than Vinyl's infamously weak 0.25 start, but that's not saying much. It should be interesting to see what this lead-in does this Sunday for the return of comedy Ballers, which did legitimately well last year after True Detective.

In a post-Game of Thrones world, the Sunday ratings juice continued to flow away from HBO and into AMC's Preacher (0.55), TNT's The Last Ship (0.62) and Showtime's Ray Donovan (0.35), which all had upticks again this week.

And FX brought back perennial bubble drama Tyrant last week with a 0.27, then saw it stumble to a 0.19 this week.

FULL TABLE:

Name

Net

Ep

A18-49

Last

Seas

Avg

y2y

Proj

ProjPlus

Skew

Male

Preacher

AMC

7

0.55

+8%

1

0.64

0.61

42

47%

59%

Greenleaf

OWN

6

0.52

-17%

1

0.60

0.54

37

36%

27%

Pretty Little Liars

FREE

4

0.60

+13%

7

0.59

-33%

0.60

41

59%

23%

Rizzoli and Isles

TNT

6

0.57

-8%

7

0.58

-16%

0.59

41

18%

31%

Suits

USA

1

0.53

6

0.53

-13%

0.53

36

36%

49%

Wrecked

TBS

6

0.40

-23%

1

0.48

0.44

30

46%

48%

The Last Ship

TNT

5

0.62

+51%

3

0.48

-33%

0.48

33

29%

57%

Major Crimes

TNT

4

0.47

-10%

5

0.47

-19%

0.49

33

16%

31%

Queen of the South

USA

3

0.38

-21%

1

0.44

0.36

25

42%

50%

Mr. Robot

USA

1

0.43

2

0.43

-7%

0.45

31

52%

59%

Animal Kingdom

TNT

6

0.42

-16%

1

0.43

0.42

29

44%

50%

Girl Meets World

DISN

6

0.35

-38%

3

0.43

-19%

0.42

29

29%

The Fosters

FREE

3

0.34

-28%

4

0.40

-8%

0.44

30

55%

25%

Ray Donovan

SHOW

3

0.35

+6%

4

0.32

-20%

0.35

34%

56%

Devious Maids

LIFE

6

0.34

+17%

4

0.31

-36%

0.30

20

40%

27%

Angie Tribeca

TBS

6

0.26

+4%

1

0.26

-29%

0.24

16

56%

59%

Young and Hungry

FREE

17

0.27

+8%

3

0.26

-26%

0.26

17

61%

27%

Baby Daddy

FREE

17

0.26

0%

5

0.26

-29%

0.26

18

59%

27%

Murder in the First

TNT

3

0.29

+32%

3

0.26

-15%

0.27

18

24%

45%

The Night Of

HBO

1

0.26

1

0.26

0.20

14

43%

62%

Tyrant

FX

2

0.19

-30%

3

0.23

-28%

0.27

18

33%

57%

Killjoys

SYFY

2

0.21

-12%

2

0.22

-6%

0.22

15

39%

Outlander

STAR

13

0.19

+27%

2

0.22

-16%

0.22

15

26%

34%

UnREAL

LIFE

6

0.21

0%

2

0.22

-22%

0.21

15

52%

27%

Dead of Summer

FREE

3

0.22

+10%

1

0.22

0.20

14

52%

Hell on Wheels

AMC

12

0.28

+47%

5

0.22

-30%

0.21

14

17%

56%

Motive

USA

15

0.20

-9%

3

0.21

0.21

14

33%

Scream

MTV

7

0.20

-9%

2

0.20

-43%

0.19

13

64%

Dark Matter

SYFY

2

0.16

-20%

2

0.18

-32%

0.16

11

30%

SexDrugsRockRoll

FX

2

0.13

-41%

2

0.17

-44%

0.15

10

51%

Odd Mom Out

BRAV

6

0.18

-8%

2

0.17

-46%

0.16

11

45%

Feed the Beast

AMC

7

0.10

-23%

1

0.14

0.13

9

38%

60%

Guilt

FREE

4

0.08

-43%

1

0.12

0.09

6

46%

12 Monkeys

SYFY

12

0.15

+7%

2

0.12

-53%

0.12

8

37%

Roadies

SHOW

3

0.10

-9%

1

0.09

0.09

6

34%

Hunters

SYFY

11

0.07

+17%

1

0.09

0.09

6

32%

The Cablemetrics table can be sorted by clicking any of the categories at the top (and a second click will sort in the other direction.) After having sorted by a category, you can hold SHIFT and click another category to sort by the second category within the first.